Just a suggestion, but keep a water bottle handy so that when the cat goes near the plant squirt it till it goes away from it. Keep it up until it eventually doesn't go near it. It worked with my cat and other places she isn't supposed to go.

Here's a tip for cucumbers. If you were to rake your leaves in the spring
then spread them in a pile of about one foot thick and as wide as you like.
Put your seeds in as if you were putting them in the ground.Leave them alone you don't have to water or weed them. A friend and I tried this last year and were amazed.

I'm still searching this whole site to see if there are any recent posts. Such as maybe as recent as Dec. 2003 now that we are into 2004. I love to garden even though our season here in Maine is short. Like to try a couple new perennials each year. I love foxglove and wish it lasted more than 2 seasons. It makes quite a show. Thinking of getting yellow and white ones this season from a nursery in SC. Hope this site will be more active as time goes by.

i have only been gardening for a couple of years. mostly i plant annuals in my flowerbed, but have been adding a few perennials here and there. last year, i planted hollyhocks along my fence. they were awsome. i can't wait to see them again. and i also have a small patch of cannas (orange ones)...we'll see if i stored the tubers right.
but anyway...will keep checking this forum to see what the talk is about...here it is winter..and i'm getting all kinds of seed and gardenng catalogues in the mail...i'm excited already...

Since we just moved into this house, I have some major landscaping to do. Hubby hates mowing, and I don't want to waste water on grass. I completely xeroscaped the last house and I am getting ready to do this one. By the end of summer, there won't be any grass in the front yard. I've already drawn up my plans and will make a trip to the county extension place soon so I can choose the most low maintenance I can find!

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I wanted to be a pirate, but I couldn't grow a beard and rum makes me giggle.

Hey I was all about xeroscaping and visited "The Florida House" and picked up a truckload of leaflets and then .......didn't follow through with my plan. The one tip I DID use was to place layers of newspaper over planting areas to prevent weeds from coming up under the mulch.

Our old door (for people not cars) in our garage used to be a flooding problem. I dug out a 3'x3' square, lined it with newspapers and dumped a huge amount of aquarium gravel in it. We never had fish, but we did keep snakes for a while. My hubby would find them at work, put them in his pocket (a 3 foot rat snake once!), walk around the mall doing his security thing and then bring them home. The 5 foot rat snake he found and put it in a paper bag. All day long people asked him what was in the bag. He wouldn't tell them it was a snake, he just told them to take a look.

The only thing I ever minded about that was when they both just vanished. We never found or smelled them in the house, so I guess they made it outside. We used to keep our sliding glass door open all the time and it didn't have a screen.

I also used to collect old bricks and patio stones (especially the broken ones!) and made a patio out of them off the back porch. It was great and not an overwhelming task since I never found many bricks or stones at one time. It took about 5 years to build it.

Where is the "Florida House"? I've never heard of it and I have lived in FL most of my life.

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I wanted to be a pirate, but I couldn't grow a beard and rum makes me giggle.